


Angels & Ministers of Grace

by AndreaLyn



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24963595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: Pike should have known he was in trouble the minute a fuzzy-face angel awoke him from surgery. He also should have known Jim Kirk wouldn't let go without a fight.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Christopher Pike
Comments: 2
Kudos: 39





	Angels & Ministers of Grace

The first thing he sees when he comes out of his medically induced coma is the fuzzy vision of her eyes staring at him. She smiles softly and there’s a crinkle that rises at the corner of her lips and Pike thinks to himself: _I almost died, didn’t I?_ , but that thought is so far away because she’s looking down at him like an angel through the haze of the chemicals and drugs.  
  
“Captain Pike?” Her voice echoes. “The surgery is done. I did everything I could.”  
  
He can’t exactly feel anything below his waist and he wonders if this is some extended dream that he’s still having, guided along by the painkillers they had pumped him full of when they got him back to the ship. Or maybe this is simply truncated real life. Either way, Doctor Leah McCoy is framed by white light and it gives her a halo that makes her look like an honest-to-god angel here to take care of him.  
  
A soft sigh passes his lips and he stares up at her fondly. “Tell me the bad news, Doc,” he insists.  
  
“The slug did some severe damage to your spinal cord. I’m afraid that it’s going to be months before you’ll walk again and you’ll need some intensive physical therapy that I’ll be overseeing,” she says, her voice stern and serious. Her hair is serious, too, pinned up perfectly with pins a plenty and Pike wonders if she ever lets it loose.  
  
He’s sure he’s seen holovids of her and Jim at the Academy, wild and reckless, swimming through fountains and drinking too much and generally causing the kind of ruckus that requires an intervening council. That seems so far away now and she looks so concerned for him, so much more mature than a girl who would abandon a fancy dress party for the Deltan ambassadors in order to go splashing around a fountain with James T. Kirk.  
  
“So,” Pike begins slowly as he closes his eyes and relishes the touch of her fingers fluttering against his neck to find and record his pulse. “What you’re saying is that I _will_ be walking again,” he interprets and opens his eyes to the sight of Dr. McCoy smiling at him like he’s just given her the world’s greatest compliment. “I knew you were a miracle-worker, woman, I didn’t know you were this good.”  
  
He feels the slight pain of a hypospray against his neck and hisses mildly, trying to hold onto the mental image of McCoy smiling at him and trying to just recall the touch of her fingers against his forehead, brushing his hair back.  
  
“There was a sedative in that, wasn’t there?” he slurs.  
  
“Clever Captain,” she notes wryly in return.  
  
“So they say,” is all Pike gets out before he swims closer to the darkness of unconsciousness, dreams not even waiting for him in the depth of his exhaustion.  
  
**  
  
When he comes to, the room is dark. He recognizes it. It’s the artificial lighting that they use to indicate night. Though there are employees working, the general air is a hushed and dulled one to counteract the bright mimicry of sunlight during the day. He shifts and pushes himself into a sit and feels a heavy stabbing of pain pushing through his legs.  
  
Pike thinks it’s better than the alternative: nothing at all would have made him wonder just what there is to go on for when there’s still so much of a universe to explore.  
  
The snore from his bedside catches his attention and he immediately puts himself on guard. Just because he can’t really move doesn’t mean he’s helpless and he searches for a weapon, settling on the IV stand if necessary. He grips the stainless steel base with trembling fingers and readies it in case he needs to attack.  
  
“Put it down,” the woman warns blearily, rubbing at her eyes as she adjusts and sits forward, reaching her fingers out to slide along his forearm and take his pulse the old-fashioned way, two fingers pressing lightly against his pale skin. She’s as warm as a furnace and Pike curves towards her as he releases the makeshift-weapon. She’s on her feet smoothly and Pike takes the moment to watch the way her labcoat clings to her hips and creates a pleasant shape.  
  
He takes another moment to wonder just how many drugs he’s under the influence of.  
  
He reaches out to clasp her hand when she slowly begins to draw her fingers away. “Doctor McCoy,” he scratchily comments.  
  
“Yes, sir?”  
  
“It’s the middle of the night. Don’t you have a proper bed to use?”  
  
“Jim is using it,” she provides helpfully. “Seeing as he wasn’t even supposed to be here, nothing got assigned to him, not even temporarily. I’m being a good friend and helping him out.”  
  
Something in Pike’s mind tells him that it’s a good sign that she isn’t there curling up against that well-sought-after body that the Academy had long-spoken of. Something tells him that he’s pleased that she’s made his bedside into her resting place. Something in him is noticing the way she’s looking at him.  
  
“How many drugs did you put in me?” he asks ruefully as all those somethings start coming to roost.  
  
“You really don’t want to know, Captain,” she promises and brushes back a piece of hair that’s gone and fallen into his eyes. “You should go back to sleep. The torture you endured is going to require a very long recovery period and you might as well start now.”  
  
McCoy is starting to blur right before his eyes and Pike can’t help but smile dizzily up at her.  
  
“What’s so very funny?” McCoy wonders.  
  
“I’m just…happy,” he breathes out that last word. It may be the drugs and it may be the situation, but with a blurry angel standing over him and administering drugs into his system to keep him content and filled with bliss, he really is just _happy_. “Keep up the good work, Doc.”  
  
“Well,” McCoy breathes out the word with genuine bemusement. Pike’s eyes grow heavier and he can feel himself slipping away, forgetting that he doesn’t have use of his legs and his body isn’t covered in the marks of many a surgery, “That I will, sir.”  
  
**  
  
They had first met one stormy summer afternoon when the Academy was drenched with inches of rain. Pike knew who she was by reputation, but had never exactly met this mythical woman that Jim Kirk had started to call ‘Bones’ because of something to do with her profession. She’s attempting to cover her head with a newspaper, but it’s failing miserably and she’s soaked head to toe in cadet reds, miniskirt clinging to (admittedly very attractive) legs.  
  
“Need a hand?” Pike offers from underneath his large black umbrella, not waiting for the answer before he hurries to give her a respite from the elements.  
  
She huffs water off her upper lip and offers him a grateful smile. “Captain Pike, right?”  
  
“That’s me.”  
  
“Jim tells stories about you,” she points out as she adjusts her waterlogged medical kit against her hip, leaning over for a moment to hike up knee-high boots and smooth down her tunic. “Something about how you dared him to do better and that’s what led him to that shuttle just in time to catch my eight-AM performance of a panic attack.”  
  
“And here I heard there was a fabulous repeat showing at eleven,” Pike deadpans with a smile in McCoy’s direction.  
  
He gets a laugh out of her and he mentally records that as miracle. McCoy’s got a reputation on campus for being a cold hard bitch in heels, not taking excuses for failures and not accepting mediocrity. She TA’s several classes and does a small specialization class that Starfleet’s glad to have her for and the cadets live in fear of her.  
  
“Come on, huddle under here,” he coaxes as he shakes the umbrella off, ridding raindrops in various directions as she presses in closer to him and he takes a moment to explain away the inexplicable delight he feels at being able to feel her warmth. “Where are you headed?”  
  
“I’ve got hours at the clinic,” she explains. “Just southeast on Campus if you’re headed that way.”  
  
“Just the way I was headed,” he lies easily, his office abandoned for another hour. It can wait. There’s nothing direly urgent about it. He sneaks one last quick look at those legs on display and presses his lips together as he thinks decidedly impure thoughts about one of his cadets – even if she’s not quite _his_  
  
**  
  
Pike is surprised and not at the same time when McCoy announces that she’s going to personally oversee his care. Some pompous and loud voice in the back of his head is telling him that it’s only right that the CMO attend to his care, but with the ship as wounded as it is, protocol has been falling by the wayside no matter where they go. He chooses, instead of thinking of it as protocol, to see it as something _she_ wants to do.  
  
The ship is still crawling slowly back to Earth and it seems to be taking its toll on the whole crew. McCoy is most certainly not exempted. She shows up for their second PT session with hair sticking out in various directions, a pale look to her face, and wearing a black shirt that’s too tight for her and has droplets of blood on it.  
  
She catches him staring at the way it pulls taut against her chest and plucks at the sleeve. “S’Jim’s,” she explains tiredly. “We’re getting the laundry done and he loaned it out to me so I wouldn’t have to come in here and help you do your stretches wearing nothing but a bra.”  
  
Pike’s mind helpfully supplies that he wouldn’t have minded that in the least. He’s definitely begun to take a shine to these little sessions in which she barks commands at him to follow, pressing her hands on his upper thighs to apply pressure as she demands stretches of him. She checks her messages and grabs the necessary tools they use to exercise the atrophied and ruined muscles in his legs.  
  
“Well, Doc?” he greets wryly. “What’s our goal today?”  
  
“Twenty reps, Captain,” she distractedly replies, still sending messages on her padd, standing close enough that he can smell her soap (not her usual, which means she was probably showering in the Captain’s water-shower and using soap that usually belongs to him). She sets the padd down on the table and gracefully slides into a crouch right before him, peering up at him with those firecracker eyes of hers, reaching out with both arms. “Left leg, please, Captain,” she orders. He’s sure she meant it to be a request, but Leah McCoy has a habit of turning everything she says into firm orders that men are helpless to ignore.  
  
It takes a magnitude of effort, but he manages (barely) to lift his leg. He watches its tremble and thinks to himself how close it had been. It feels like he should be moving mountains, but he’s only managed to lift his leg a scant two inches.  
  
Twenty reps are going to be hell on earth.  
  
He opens his mouth to breath and an almost inhuman scream comes out as he pushes through the pain and gets his leg up to where she wants it. She braces him, holds his leg up, takes away the burden and the pain. His breath rushes out in one pushed breath and he watches as she guides his leg down to the beginning.  
  
“Again,” she commands, looking up at his face, gaze skimming over the beads of sweat that have begun to roll down his forehead.  
  
**  
  
He’s under strict orders not to leave Sickbay, but the little flicker of a _look_ he got from Chapel as he’s being situated into the wheelchair suggests that he ought to be disregarding instructions and taking the thing out for a spin. It’s mechanical and could do all the spinning for him, but he still likes to flick the switch to manual and do things for himself.  
  
It’s as he’s roaming own the halls, fearing being caught by McCoy, that he runs right into the knees of Acting Captain Jim Kirk.  
  
“Sir,” Jim bemusedly remarks as he reaches down to steady the chair. “I’m not Bones. You don’t need to take me out.”  
  
Pike wonders what the remark is supposed to mean, but more than that, he wonders what that look of shame and guilt on Jim’s face means. “Have there been rumors?”  
  
“Only the usual,” Jim admits and then after a passing beat in which Pike clearly hasn’t heard any of them, deigns to fill in the blanks. “You know, Bones is a bitch in heels aiming to torture all her patients. The usual crap that people spout when they don’t know anything about her.”  
  
Pike can hear the adamant defense in his voice and thinks that he’s not exactly in much a different situation. If he heard rumors like that, he’d be quick to shut them down, as well.  
  
“Well,” Pike assures. “You don’t have to worry. She’s treating me well. More than well.”  
  
Jim studies him at that, giving his own curious look, but Pike doesn’t have time to think on it too long, because he’s late for his PT and if he’s not back in ten minutes, McCoy will have his ass. And it won’t be in any pleasant way that might have suggested itself while he’s high on the drugs she pumps through him.  
  
**  
  
He wakes and hears soft breathing at his side, feels warmth breath against his neck. For a moment, he thinks he’s still dreaming. He shifts stiff fingers and reaches them up to brush away at dark hair. “Number One?” he murmurs quietly, getting a confused sound in reply before the head and the body belonging to that dark hair jerks away.  
  
“Captain,” McCoy states, cheeks flushed. “Sorry. I was reading and I guess I fell asleep. Shit,” she gets out, gaping at the drool marks on the blankets and she touches the pillow marks on her cheek. “Fell asleep on you, looks like.”  
  
He takes a look at the book she’s reading – advanced neuropathy for alien races – and thinks it’s a wonder she’s managed to stay awake at all while reading it. He affects an easy shrug and smiles up at her, wondering if she knows that even mussed and groggy, she’s beautiful.  
  
“It’s okay,” he promises. “Really. Like you said, Jim’s got your bed. I can’t imagine there’s much sleep to be done,” he says, in a way that indicates he doesn’t want to hear any stories otherwise about what they do instead of sleep. “Listen, McCoy...”  
  
“I was just drooling on you and it’s past working hours,” she interrupts. “call me Leah, sir.”  
  
“Then you call me Chris.” He reaches out and brushes back one of those frizzy strands of dark hair. “I could use some sleep. How about you read to me from that big book of yours?”  
  
He gets a broad grin in reply to that and, heavens forfend, even a laugh.  
  
“Yes, sir,” she concurs. With one pointed look from his direction, she amends herself quickly enough. “You got it, Chris.”  
  
**  
  
He’s just managed to get the hang of the wheelchair when the Enterprise makes it back to Earth and the Engineering team has become ingenious enough to fix the systems necessary to transport them all down. “Here, wait,” McCoy says as she adjusts his shirt, helping him slide into it with lingering hands. “There, now you’re all set. And I will see you down there _five seconds_ after you get sent down. If you have a metal shard for a bone, I’m going to be real pissed, Chris, you hear me?”  
  
He smiles easily at that. He hasn’t thought that recovering from a traumatic event that gives him nightmares and causes horribly debilitating pain would give him cause to smile so much. And yet, there she is staring up at him with that permanent glare on her face as she rants and raves about the transporter.  
  
Christopher Pike knows that he’s in love with Dr. Leah McCoy the minute his atoms reassemble in his apartment on Earth. He knows that he’s going to do something about it by the time she appears in his front hall.  
  
**  
  
She has a toothbrush on his bathroom sink, she has dresses and button-downs and labcoats in his closet, and her ID card for the hospital is on his front table. Beyond that, his home smells like her. Pike’s not sure which one of these things is the final push, but he’s fairly sure that one of them is when he answers the door and finds Jim Kirk standing there.  
  
“Admiral,” he politely notes.  
  
“Captain.” He is relieved. He is happy. He would be _happier_ if he didn’t know that Jim’s due to select his CMO within the next twenty-four hours and while no paperwork has been pushed through just yet, he knows exactly whose name is going to fill that registrar given time. “Did you need me for something?” He leans heavily on his cane, precarious on his feet, but _victorious_ on them as well, happy to be a survivor of a war that too many people hadn’t managed to come out of alive.  
  
Jim doesn’t wait for an invitation inside. He pushes past and stands in the middle of the den, staring around him and breathing like he’s about to have one of Leah’s panic attacks.  
  
“I overheard one of my professors saying something about this, but I didn’t believe it, I didn’t think it was true,” Jim is saying as he roots through Pike’s life, picking up books that Pike knows belong to McCoy, rifling through medical journals she’s brought into his home. “You and her. You two, you’re not just having sex, are you? You’re actually...”  
  
“Dating?” Pike offers mildly, enduring Jim’s little act with as much calmness as he can bear.  
  
“You’re not. You can’t be.”  
  
“Jim, if I were to tell you that Leah McCoy was my girlfriend, would you in any reality take it well?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“And yet, you think I should have told you?”  
  
“I think one of you should have said it was happening,” Jim accuses, heated up and actually _angry_. “I was being patient. I was there from the start. I held her hair back while she puked on the shuttle and I took her out drinking every anniversary of the divorce. I sat with her and rubbed her back every time she called her baby girl.” He’s defiant, chin lifted stubbornly in the air. “I was being a gentleman. I was waiting.”  
  
“You waited too long,” is all Pike has to say on the matter.  
  
The smile Jim gives him is broken and terrifying all at once and Pike starts to regret not being kinder. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. He may be with Leah, but her bond with Jim isn’t tenuous and fresh. It’s strong with threads of steel. “Of course, sir,” he too-politely agrees. “Well, I guess I’ll see you on departure day, sir. I need to go finalize my selections, even if every department has already agreed with my picking them. Even medical.”  
  
And there it is, plain as day, the confirmation that Jim is getting what he wants, even if he’s not getting everything. At least, not yet. If Pike’s learned one thing about Jim, it’s that he doesn’t believe in no-win situations.  
  
He stares at Jim, thinks of the clothes in his closet and the toiletries in his bathroom, and wonders how they managed to start a personal war.  
  
“You don’t want to do this, Kirk.”  
  
“I think I do, Admiral,” Jim says with a hapless shrug. “I was willing to wait. But if I have to fight, I’m willing to do that too.”  
  
He tips his head forward in a respectful nod and excuses himself from Pike’s apartment, leaving him to nurse his thoughts of dread and ruminate on inevitability. The door slams shut and Pike knows that Jim’s right. He’s going to have to fight. They both are. Jim Kirk may have beaten the odds, but Pike’s vaulted over them and lived for it.  
  
He’s ready.  
  
At the same time, he is terrified at the knowledge of the truth he’s trying to ignore: no matter how hard he fights, no matter how hard Jim battles, it’s not going to matter. This is going to come down Dr. Eleanor McCoy and Pike’s learned long ago that predicting her mindset is something best left to chance.  
  
Still, he’ll do his damn best to affect her decision.  
  
“Alright, Pike, time to punch it,” he says to himself and limps off to the bedroom to get things ready for when she comes home, in the event this is going to be one of their last nights together.


End file.
